Electronic Warfare
WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
By Martin
LIBICKI
The first two forms of information warfare discussed here deal
with attacks either on systems (C2 warfare) or by systems (IBW).
The third form is EW, or operational techniques: radioelectronic
and cryptographic, thus war in the realm of communications. EW
attempts to degrade the physical basis for transferring
information, while cryptographic warfare works between bits and
bytes.
Neither type of EW is truly new. In tandem, they underlay
Britain's success in defending its island against the Luftwaffe. In
recent years, as information warfare has acquired a certain cachet,
efforts have been made to reinvent EW under this new moniker. Note 24 Its supposed current rise in
status is occurring just as technologies are being developed that
will favor the bits (like the bomber of yore) getting
through.
Antiradar
Note 25 A large portion of the EW community deals with radars
(both search and target) and worries about jamming and
counterjamming. Offense and defense keep coming up with new
techniques. Traditional radars generate a signal at one frequency;
knowing the frequency makes it easy to jam a return signal. More
modern radars hop from one outgoing frequency band to the next. To
counter radars, today's jammers must be able to acquire the
incoming signal, determine its frequency, tune the outgoing jamming
signal accordingly, and send a blur back quickly enough to minimize
the length and strength of the reflected signal. Jamming aircraft
that are riding in formation with attack aircraft often wipe out
return signals (which weaken as the fourth power of the distance
between radar and target) by overpowering them, but doing so makes
jammers very visible so they must protect themselves. Coalition
forces in the Gulf developed new synergies using jamming aircraft
en masse. Radars make themselves targets because of their outgoing
signals; antiradiation missiles (e.g., the HARM) force radars
either to be turned off or to rely on chirping and sputtering. The
aborted Tacit Rainbow missile was designed to loiter in an attack
area until a radar turned itself on; the outgoing signal gave the
missile an incoming beacon, and away it went. As digitization
improves, radar can acquire a target by generating a transient
pulse and analyzing the return signal before a false jamming signal
overwhelms the reflection.
The cheaper digital manipulation becomes, the more logic
favors the separation of an emitter from a collector. Emitters, the
targets of antiradiation missiles, would proliferate, to ensure the
survival of the system and to act as sponges for expensive
missiles. The missiles would create a large virtual dish out of a
collection of overlapping small ones. Because outgoing signals will
be more complex, collection algorithms too will grow in complexity,
but the ability of jammers to cover the more complex circle
adequately may lag. Dispersing the collection surface will also
make radars less inviting targets.
Anticommunications
EW against communicators is generally more difficult to wage than
EW against radars. The signal strength of communications weakens
with the distance to the transmitter squared (versus the fourth
power with radar). While radars try to illuminate a target (and
therefore send a beam into the assets of the other side),
communicators try to avoid the other side entirely and thus point
in specific directions. Communicators move toward frequency-
hopping, spread-spectrum, and code-division multiple access (CDMA)
technologies, which are difficult to jam and intercept.
Communications to and from known locations (e.g., satellites, UAVs)
can use digital technologies to focus on frontal signals and
discard jamming that comes from the sides. Digital compression
techniques coupled with signal redundancy mean that bit streams can
be recovered intact, even if large parts are destroyed.
EW is also used to geolocate the emitter. The noisier the
environment, the more difficult the task. One defense is to
multiply sources of background electronic clutter shaped to foil
intercept techniques that rely on distinguishing real signal
patterns. Note 26 A thorough job, of
course, requires expending resources to scatter emitters in areas
where they may plausibly indicate military activity. Doing so
diverts resources from other missions.
As suggested above, the work of finding targets is likely to
shift from manned platforms to distributed systems of sensors.
Despite the impending necessity of distributed systems, their
Achilles' heel is the need for reliable, often heavily used
communications links between many sensors, command systems, and
dispersed weapons. Note 27 In
sensor-rich environments, EW -- expressed by jamming or by soft-
kill -- can assume a new importance. Interference with
communications from local sensors, for instance, can create virtual
blank areas through which opposing systems can move with less
chance of detection. The success of this tactic critically depends
on the architecture of the distributed sensor system to be
disrupted. A system that relies exclusively on distributed
local sensors (intercommunicating or relaying signals by low power
to switches) is the most vulnerable. A system that interleaves
local and stand-off sensors, particularly where coverage varies and
overlap is common, is more robust.
Cryptography
By scrambling its own messages and unscrambling those of the other
side, each side performs the quintessential act of information
warfare, protecting its own view of reality while degrading that of
the other side. Although cryptography continues to attract the best
minds in mathematics, sadly for an otherwise long and glorious
history, contests in this realm will soon be only of historical
interest.
Decoding computer-generated messages is fast becoming
impossible. The combination of technologies such as the triple-
digital encryption standard (DES) for message communication using
private keys, and public key encryption (PKE) for passing private
keys using public keys (so set up communications remain in the
clear) will probably overwhelm the best code-breaking computers.
The basic mathematics is simple: for any key length x, for
DES data encryption the power required to break the codes Note 28 is A*Nx (where x
is the key length, A is positive, and N exceeds 1) and the power
required to make the codes is B*Xm (where B is positive and
M exceeds 1). Regardless of the quantity of A, B, M, and N, as soon
as x exceeds some number, breaking a code is harder than
creating one and becomes increasingly harder as x
grows.
Although encryption is spreading on the Internet and all
communications are going digital, the transition to ubiquitous
encryption will take time. Analog will certainly persist in legacy
systems, although its lifetime is limited. Cheap encryption,
coupled with signal-hiding techniques such as spread-spectrum and
frequency-hopping, will seal the codebreaker's fate.
Digital technologies will make spoofing -- substituting
deceptive messages for valid ones -- nearly impossible. Digital-
signature technologies permit recipients to know both who (or what)
sent the message and whether the message was tampered with. Unless
the spoofer can get inside the message-generation system or the
recipient cannot access a list of universal digital keys (e.g.,
updates are unavailable to that location), the odds of a successful
spoof are becoming quite low. Note
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